Life in a small ISV

More ISV Startup Resources

AdeBullock — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 18:21:00 GMT

My earlier post on resources for startups generated a lot of interest and so I thought another instalment would be worthwhile. Most of the things I pointed to in the previous post are still valid but there are a few different/new things worth mentioning. I should say these are resources which have been useful for us at Contigo where we build applications for Energy and Utility companies using Microsoft technology - they may be more or less useful to you depending on your type of company/application!

The first is a new initiative from Microsoft called BizSpark, aimed at wooing software startup companies to use Microsoft technology, it is a sexier version of the existing Empower program and provides access to the latest tools and technologies, including Visual Studio Team Suite, for an initial cost of $0. There a few conditions but seems a great opportunity for new software companies.

Once you are up and running, you'll find that there are other things you have to do other than develop software. One of the most important is sales and marketing - if you don't have anyone to buy what you're developing, what's the point. There are some very expensive ways to achieve this but as a small company you need some shortcuts. The Sales and Marketing books from the Beermat Entrepeneur guys are great guides to undertaking sales and marketing activities on a limited budget.

You will at some point need a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system to manage all your sales and marketing activity. We use Microsoft Dynamics but there are plenty of free or cheap alternatives such as Sugar CRM, Highrise from 37Signals, Salesforce Group Edition and Zoho CRM. It is important to capture and track as much as you can about your current and potential customers.

One obvious tip is to make yourself stand out; the world is not short of software companies so you need to define why you are different by selecting a particular niche market or USP (Unique Selling Point). Seth Godin has plenty of advice on how to make yourselves stand out and has written several books on marketing with a difference.

At some point you will need to deliver presentations to potential clients, investors or partners. This is a good opportunity to look dynamic and different rather than delivering another "Death by PowerPoint" presentation. Garry Reynolds Presentation Zen book and blog presents a more graphical method of designing presentations as does Cliff Atkinson in his Beyond Bullet Points book. Once you follow this approach, you need lots of images to use - we use iStockPhoto and stock.xchng for cheap and/or free, high quality graphics for our presentations, brochures and web site.

Once you have your application out there, you are probably going to have to support it. We use an online help desk from zendesk to provide web and email based support to our customers. It is not dissimilar in approach to Basecamp from 37signals which we also use. This allows us to present a professional support operation to our customers for very little cost.

Finally, there are a few other web sites which I monitor regularly that are interesting or useful for startup ISV's which you may or may not be aware of:

TechCrunch and TechCrunch UK - very well known blog/news sites following startups and new technology companies
OnStartups - blog by serial entrepreneur Dharmesh Shah
47 Hats - ISV community support site by Bob Walsh with mostly a MS focus
Microsoft Startup Zone
Techmeme - aggregated technology news site

An Audience with Bill Gates

AdeBullock — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 11:38:00 GMT

Yesterday, myself, my colleague Jon and about 500 other MS partners, were lucky enough to see Bill Gates speak in person at a 2008 pre launch event in London. Its the first, and probably last time, I will get to see Bill Gates speak so it was quite an experience - one to tell the grandchildren about (when I was in the same room as the world's richest man!). Unfortunately, we didn't get a proper chance to meet Bill, he was wheeled in for his keynote and a few Q and A's and then whisked off to his next appointment (hopefully a good tailor because he was wearing a fairly dodgy suit). With judicious use of elbows we did manage to get to sit in row 3 right in front of him.

Before he arrived they played the infamous "Bill's last day at MS" video which is well worth watching, even just for a bit of celebrity spotting. He then talked about the "Magic of Software" and where he sees technology going for the next 10 years or so. Lots of stuff about pervasive computing, model driven development, cloud services etc. He's probably given this talk a few times and it came over very smoothly. He's obviously still passionate about software and technology and he seems keen to use technology as much as he can as part of his foundation work, particularly in improving healthcare in the third world. He also gave an idea of the areas he would stay involved in at Microsoft: Office, Surface/Touch computing and Search. He talked about Ray Ozzie briefly and mentioned that Ray has admitted that Notes (that Ozzie invented for you youngsters out there) is now obsolete! I wish that was true – we still have the odd client using it, including trying to run one of our ASP.NET apps within the Notes browser!

The rest of the day was showcasing the 2008 launch wave; namely Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008. The main launch for these in the UK is on 19th March at the ICC in Birmingham, which is just up the road from our offices. They've had over 2000 registrations for this already and are trying to find more space for it. There will be a few of us there from Contigo so if anyone needs some help on finding the best pubs in Birmingham, feel free to get in touch.

In terms of the new stuff, MS are pushing virtualisation, clustering and System Center management in a big way; we need to start looking at these and we plan to get a 2008 server up and running in the next week or so. We have upgraded a couple of our applications to VS2008/.Net3.5 reasonably painlessly already, although we haven't taken advantage of the new features just yet.

We particularly like the new spatial features in SQL Server 2008 - we mainly develop applications for the energy industry and there a lot of assets which have a location: power stations, gas pipelines, wind farms etc. Linking this spatial data with information on generation, wind speed, gas flows etc could be very powerful and something we hope to do in the near future, probably with Silverlight. SQL Server allows you to store spatial data in terms of polygons, points and lines and then you can do functions such as intersect, distance between points etc.

Anyway, I urge you to attend your nearest 2008 launch event in the next couple of months, if only for the potential freebies if the VS2005 launch is an example.

ISV Startup Resources

AdeBullock — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 09:26:00 GMT

There are plenty of resources and help available when starting an ISV, probably too much. When starting our company Contigo, we spent a long time reading, talking, researching and surfing for help, advice and hopefully some financial assistance. Pretty soon we decided we were going to be a self funded startup and fund the company through revenue rather than outside investment. This is very much the approach recommended by the Beermat Entrepreneur which is one of the most useful books we read. It has worked out fine for us - the big benefit of being a software company is the main cost is people, so if you can afford to live on bread and water for a few months before you start earning revenue, you should be OK.

The Getting Real ebook by 37Signals is a great read and provides a great philosophy on how to build applications and run a company. We use the Basecamp application by 37Signals as a project portal for our clients. 37Signals are Web2.0 poster boys and are the guys who "invented" Ruby on Rails as part of building Basecamp.

Microsoft has two great programs for new and small ISV's - the Action Pack allows partner companies to get a bunch of Windows, Office and server licences for a small annual fee. The Empower program is aimed at ISV companies as a first step to becoming a Certified or Gold partner. It provides 5 Visual Studio, MSDN and other licences for internal use. This meant we were fully licensed for Office, Windows, Visual Studio, Exchange etc.

Microsoft does have a web site dedicated to startups called the Startup Zone; it's still a little light on content but is useful. There are lots of good programs from MS on helping ISV companies build and deliver products, especially if they are using the latest and greatest technology. Some examples worth looking at are Innovate On and Metro (invitation required from your local DPE). SaaS (Software as a service) is being heavily pushed as well by MS, if that is your thing. When you do sign up as a MS partner (you can be a registered partner for free) make sure you use the Solution Profiler to describe your products and services - we have had a few useful leads via this route.

As I mentioned before, we also do a reasonable amount of development work with Oracle. Many of our customers still use Oracle as their preferred database so any solution we provide has to be able to run against either Oracle or SQL Server. Oracle also has a good partner program called Technology Network, which allows you to download and use any of their software for internal development (non-production use for free) - it's the Oracle equivalent of MSDN Universal for $0.

There are various good blogs/sites on starting up and running a company and for doing the non-technical things like marketing and sales:

Bob Walsh - "inventor" of the term MicroISV and author of the MicroISV book
Seth Godin - prolific author and speaker on marketing
Guy Kawaski - author of Art of the Start
Joel Spolsky - ex Microsoftie who runs Fogcreek software

One big thing to realise when you do start your own company is you no longer have the support of a large IT department - you are the IT department. You suddenly have set up your own email, servers, backups, source code control, finance systems, CRM etc. This is where the Action Pack helped enormously - we use Exchange and Sharepoint for as much as possible, and various web based tools such as Basecamp. We've had to buy a bunch of servers and organise off site backup, organising hosting for our web site and so on. Now we are a certified partner we now use Team Foundation Server for source code control and work item tracking, together with the Scrum template from Conchango and TeamPlain Web Access which is now free since being bought from Microsoft and now has the catchy title of Team System Web Access Power Tool.

In the next instalment, I'll start a getting a little more techy and answering the question - how as an ISV with only limited resources can you build enterprise level ASP.NET applications reasonably quickly?

New Blog - Life in a small ISV

AdeBullock — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 10:34:00 GMT

Thanks to Joe for setting this blog up for me. I'd better introduce myself: my name is Ade Bullock - I'm Co-owner/Lead Developer/Teaboy for a small startup ISV called Contigo, based in Solihull in the UK, building enterprise ASP.NET applications for the Energy and Utilities industries. We develop both packaged and bespoke applications using most of the MS stack as well as occasionally some Java and Oracle.

Rather than being too technically focused I want to provide more of a real-world insight into the challenges of building, selling and deploying ASP.NET apps into big enterprise customers and also the various highs and lows of running and working in a small ISV. For most of my career I've been a developer/architect in large companies building line of business (LOB) applications. Myself and a few techy friends finally had the courage to start our own company in 2006 and it's been a roller coaster ride ever since.

My first bit of advice to anyone considering the jump to start their own ISV is to do it - I wish I'd done it years ago. You need to have a positive outlook as there will be plenty of lows as well as many highs. My second bit of advice is to have a reasonably clear focus on what you intend to do. Rather than being a general software development shop, we are focused on the Energy market as we know the market well, have lots of contacts and have identified lots of potential opportunities. Having a pool of a few hundred potential clients is often easier than having a potential pool of 1000's of companies.

In the next issue, I'll provide some more detail on the various things we had to do to startup the company and the great resources available from Microsoft for ISVs. I might slip in the odd techy tip as well. Stay tuned.